Ontreto

by Peter Crawley

  “When you say not capable, what do you mean?”

  “What I mean is he stands in his brother’s shadow. He is not an alpha male; Claudio is not built like a bull, not like his brother. He is what some would call the piccolo della cucciolata.”

  Ric searches the floor for a translation and then fastens on it, “The runt of the litter?”

  “Yes, that is the right expression: the runt of the litter. If you have seen him, you would know him. Claudio is unusual, he has more hair on his face than on his head.”

  45

  “Oh,” she says, studying the combination of surprise and horror etched in his expression, “so you have seen him.”

  After a few seconds during which Ric recalls the body buried beneath the rubble in the padlocked room of the pumice warehouse, he replies quietly, “I may have, yes.”

  “Then you would not have forgotten his face.”

  “No,” Ric replies; an image of Claudio’s awful rictus grin leaps into his mind, “I guess I wouldn’t. You said he has a negozio di ferramenta in Canneto; a hardware store.”

  “Yes, for building supplies and this kind of thing. Most of the building materials that come to the island are brought over by Marcello and his brother. Claudio only has a small shop, but it is a fairly exclusive business; what you might call a monopoly on the supply of construction materials.”

  “What’s he like? I mean, I understand what you say about him being different to Marcello, but is he a popular guy like his brother?”

  Valeria considers his question and decides, “In some ways. He is not married, so people assume he is gay. There is still some homophobia here, despite what others will tell you. But, they are right. When Claudio is not to be found in his shop, he is in Palermo. He goes to a club there: Exit, I think it is called. I have always found Claudio to be pleasant and polite. But then, most people are this way with me. After all, when one reaches a certain age one becomes venerated like the statue of San Bartolo, which, I am sure, is why the old people congregate there at passeggio.”

  “Does he get on well with his brother?” Ric asks, careful to employ the present tense.

  “As far as I know, yes. But he has a difficult – no, one would say tempestuous – relationship with his father, which is probably why he was not present at the funeral on the day you arrived. His father was not one for modern attitudes, particularly when it comes to single men, so Claudio saw him only occasionally.”

  “Must have been awkward for him to stay away from the funeral,” Ric remarks.

  “Yes, I gather it has caused some argument within the family. But Claudio is a very sensitive creature and I am told he went to the mountains rather than risk causing a scene at the service and after in the cemetery.” She pauses. “Of course, Marcello did not understand his brother’s behaviour.”

  Only, Ric knows Claudio was never going to make it to his father’s funeral; he was too busy waiting for his own; one which may never be held. And he wonders if Marcello had anything to do with his brother’s death. His reaction could be what Commissario Talaia described as hiding in plain sight.

  “Marcello’s father was Onofrio?” he asks.

  “Yes. Onofrio. He could be a very unforgiving man. They say he was one of the last of the Vecchi Signori: the old men, a senior figure.”

  “A godfather?”

  Valeria laughs, “No, not in the sense of being the boss of a crime family. Onofrio was well respected and one who, like a magistrate, would provide judgements others would abide by. Life was Onofrio’s way or…”

  “The highway?”

  “Yes, although I was going to say Aliscafo.” She thinks, wondering how best to capture the spirit of the man. “There were times when Onofrio could be brutal when passing sentence. Those he judged against could be told to leave the island; those he looked upon kindly, could expect charity. Nobody ever questioned his authority.”

  “Is Marcello now the same?”

  “Perhaps,” Valeria replies, a shade solemnly. “We will see.” She reaches over and lights the small lantern on the table.

  “Did Onofrio die of natural causes? The date on his casket plaque suggested he was quite an age.”

  “I understand he fell. He lived on his own in a house up in Pirrera; the maid found him out on the terrace the next day. The house was open and nothing was missing, so the police were not suspicious. When the doctors examined him, they could not tell if he had died from a haemorrhage or from the blow to his head when he fell.”

  “There were a good number of mourners in his funeral cortège,” Ric remarks, thinking out loud of the long procession in the Corso Vittorio.

  “It is as I said; he was respected.”

  “I didn’t see you amongst the crowd.”

  “No,” she shakes her head, “I stay away from funerals; the cortège only ever leads to journey’s end and that is a journey I would rather live without making. Cemeteries remind me of how little time I have left.”

  Ric is at a loss as to how to respond. The sadness in her tone and the inevitability of her assertion leave him temporarily winded. Slowly, he hauls his thoughts back on track. “Is Old Nino a Vecchio Signori, like Onofrio?”

  “Yes, in a way, but he is not a man of such influence. The Vecchi Signori were men of power and influence. They controlled as much by the strength of their character as by their wisdom.”

  “Antonio Sciacchitano’s headstone reads that he was integerrimo. Would that have made him one of the old gentlemen like Onofrio?”

  “No,” she replies, “I hate to burst your bubble, but being one of the Vecchi Signori means being something considerably more than being a cittadino integerrimo.”

  Ric is lightly crestfallen, “But Old Nino told me that if you described someone as integerrimo, you thought of them as solid.”

  “And he was correct in telling you this. There must be worse ways of being remembered other than by being solid. He was solid?” she repeats, dreamily. “I wonder what made him solid. You have seen Nino since yesterday?”

  “Yes, this morning, his girl Ariana passed me a note in which Nino had written that he wanted to see me. I walked over the hill and had lunch with him. He told me an extraordinary tale about how his father spirited Antonio Sciacchitano away to Baarìa, in Sicily, after he had become mixed up in the escape attempt of the three deportees. You told me the story, if you remember, about Drago, Tamboia and Farinelli, and about how they were killed trying to escape. He seems to think there is no corpse in the grave belonging to Sciacchitano; seems to think the whole thing was set up by Vincenzo Maggiore to fool the authorities into thinking Sciacchitano was dead.”

  Although the sun has now set, Ric can make out her expression from the light cast by the small lantern and the glow of her cigarette when she draws on it. Valeria is looking at him very intently.

  “Baarìa, Nino said?” she asks. “Are you sure he said Baarìa?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “Because Baarìa is what they used to call the land that runs down to the sea. And Baarìa is the old name for what is now called Bagheria. And Bagheria is where I was born.” The wavering emotion in her voice betrays the nostalgia his naming the town has provoked. Her tone is both soft and sad, and almost lilting, giving the impression it is floating in from the obsidian sea before them.

  “And,” she begins slowly, “this escape I told you of? It took place in 1930, which is the same year in which I was born?” Valeria lets the question hang in the cool evening air; it is not a question she intends for him to answer.

  Ric waits for her to draw open the curtain of her thoughts and says, “Valeria, when I looked around the cemetery a couple of days ago – when I found Antonio Sciacchitano’s grave – I came across the Maggiore mausoleum. I suppose I looked around it because you’d introduced me to Marcello and I just happened to be in the Corso Vittorio when his father’s cortège passed by. You’ve never seen it?”

  “No,” she replies from the shadows, “I told you, I st
ay away from cemeteries. I am inclined to cross myself, ask for forgiveness and walk on by; nothing more. Only God will persuade me into a cemetery. Only He has that much power. Why?”

  “Antonio Sciacchitano’s grave – the one Nino thinks is empty – tells us he died in July of 1930. But there is also a casket plaque in the Maggiore mausoleum which suggests that a member of their family, Katarina Maggiore, died that same month, on the 18th. I was intrigued by the coincidence.”

  He takes a generous sip of wine and pictures the casket plaque below Vincenzo’s and beside Onofrio’s. And he remembers Nino saying that Vincenzo Maggiore was involved in arranging the botched escape of the deportees. Ric hesitates as the opaque images before his eyes become clearer: a frightened man and a petrified girl, standing before an old fisherman, wringing their hands, begging him to take them away from Devil’s Island. And Ric is not absolutely sure, if Valeria does provide him with the answer to his next question that he expects, whether he should prise open the casket of her past. But he cannot help himself.

  “What was you mother’s name, Valeria?”

  She sighs very slowly and hangs her head in her hands before mumbling softly, “Katarina.”

  46

  The silence is broken only by the cry of a herring gull. To Valeria, it must sound as though the soul of her mother is lamenting the island she deserted in her youth.

  Valeria shifts uneasily in her seat and replies a shade angrily, “This is far too much information for an old woman to contemplate in one evening, Ric.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “But what are you saying by this?” she responds, with more than a hint of incredulity. “Are you saying that your great-grandfather ran away with my mother? That perhaps you and I are in some way related? Because, if you are, I would say you have spent too much time with Nino and that the idle fascinations of an old blind man are, like some ridiculous hallucinogenic drug, stimulating your imagination. We don’t even know for sure if this Antonio Sciacchitano is related to you. Perhaps Camille has sold you the first half of a story, only for Nino to supply you with the second?”

  Ric is not sure how to answer. On the one hand he knows full well the information Camille has given him is, at best, tenuous and as for Nino, he has no idea whether he can rely on the visions of a man who sees only through his mind’s eye. “I can’t argue with that.”

  Valeria is clearly considering the implications of what he has just told her. “If this is true, then this would mean Marcello is my cousin. And,” she adds with a curious, almost condescending dose of disdain, “this means that this Antonio would have been more than a simple travelling companion for my mother; it means he would have been her lover.”

  “I take your point,” he replies, a little wounded by her arrogance. “But what if your mother was pregnant? Wouldn’t that have been sufficient motivation for her to run away?”

  “Ric, there is no way a man of Vincenzo’s standing would allow his daughter to consort with a man who was little more than a manual labourer. The Maggiore family were respected; they had standing. A daughter who would bear a child out of marriage would have brought disgrace to their house.” She pauses to think. “Of course, she would run away. At that time, it was not unheard of for a father to disown his daughter if she was pregnant outside of marriage. I told you, hypocrisy knew no bounds back then.”

  “Which means?”

  Valeria lights a cigarette. Ric is certain she is buying time to think.

  She smokes in silence for a full minute before carrying on, “All of which means that either there is a possibility that I am Marcello’s cousin, in which case there are two graves in the cemetery which lie empty, or Katarina Maggiore died of perfectly natural causes in the same month Sciacchitano fled from the island and therefore my mother is no relation of hers. It is as complicated or as simple as that.”

  “Which option would you prefer?” Ric asks, trying to lighten the mood.

  He doesn’t so much see Valeria straighten up in her seat, as feel her do it.

  She grinds the stub of her cigarette into the ashtray. “Ric, you think this is some kind of humorous discovery you have made, eh?”

  But before he can extend any kind of olive branch for what she perceives to be his inappropriate levity, she carries on, “Well, it is not. Because even though this happened more than eighty years ago, it does not lose its significance. It is the kind of scandal that can ruin a family and bring down a house, particularly one as reputable and influential as the house of Maggiore.”

  Ric’s embarrassment warms the air between them, “I apologise, Valeria, I didn’t mean to be flippant. I thought you would be pleased to know this woman might have been your mother. You said the other day you never knew your father; I thought this might help you track him down.”

  “You think he would be still alive? He would have to be older than Nino,” she scoffs.

  In the face of her indignation and out of respect for her years, Ric feels there is little else he can do but retreat. “I apologise, Valeria. I didn’t understand the affect this information would have. Please don’t think I knew where this conversation was going; I had no idea Baarìa was the same place as Bagheria. I suppose Nino uses the old name out of habit.”

  She is silent again, smouldering at him across the table. And if the stars aren’t enough, Ric is sure her wrath contains sufficient energy to illuminate the darkest of shadows.

  “Please, tell me, what can I do to atone for such a misjudgement?” He waits and watches her hide behind the redoubt of her silence.

  Valeria’s eyes glow in the light of the lantern and slowly the searing heat of her displeasure dissipates, allowing the cool of evening to disperse the cloud which has blown up between them.

  “Ric,” she leans forward, resting her chin on her hands and gazes at him, “you are a young and very attractive man. If I was but thirty years younger, I would take you to my bed and make you the gift of my body. Sadly, this is no longer a gift any man would welcome, and with good reason. However, women have other ways of persuading men to do their bidding. So, let me appeal to you as the mother I would like to have been. This information you have uncovered; let us keep it between ourselves. Please, let it be our secret. If it is true that Antonio Sciacchitano was your great-grandfather, then you have found another piece to the jigsaw of your heritage. After all, this knowledge affects no one other than you. But as far as the idea that I am related to Il Velaccino goes, this knowledge will affect many others, not least an old lady who would rather remember her life as she has known it, not how others will interpret it. Please, Ric, swear to me that you will not speak to anyone of this?

  “Swear this to me as though I was your own mother.”

  47

  Ric wakes in the bedroom of his monolocale. His head is thick, his muscles ache and the rhythmic drip of the kitchen tap reminds him it was an Italian who invented Chinese water torture, not an Oriental. He feels exhausted, as though he has passed the night swimming against a rip tide of emotion.

  He avoided the Maddalena on his way home in case the little Commissario was watching and waiting for him at the corner of the Piazza San Bartolo. On leaving the Casa dei Sconosciuti, he decided the policeman was probably already running short of blank pages in his notebook of coincidences, so he took the winding road past San Nicola rather than the shorter route through Portinente. If he was followed, he neither noticed nor cared.

  This morning his, or rather Marcello’s, monolocale seems smaller than at any time since his first night. The walls threaten to box him in and when he opens the shutters and looks out into the narrow alley, the margin of blue sky running above and between the eves of the terraced houses appears much thinner than before. He feels as though he could reach out and touch the balcony opposite only to find out it is not real.

  Ric is aware that, so far, he has been woken by first Valeria, then the curious little policeman and more recently Nino’s maid, Ariana. He wonders who is yet to come to disrup
t his morning.

  But no one disturbs the peace of the vico. Women go about their washing and pensioners, legs bowed from the years of malnutrition in their youth, hobble unhurriedly down to the Corso Vittorio to exchange gossip with the fishmonger at his Ape.

  Ric knows it is only a matter of time before Commissario Talaia comes looking for him; the thought provokes a hollow, painfully impotent anticipation deep in the pit of his stomach. If the passports don’t have his prints on them, there’s a chance the Beretta will. Someone, and all the fingers would seem to point towards Marcello, has stolen it with the express intention of shooting Candela with it and laying the blame at his door.

  But Ric knows it can’t have been Marcello, as the cigar-chewing, bull of a man was out fishing with him: they both heard the shots. But Ric also reckons Marcello is not naive enough to have committed the crime himself. Clearly, he is a big enough fish to have employed someone else to do his dirty work. Perhaps the wiry Salvo is his man or, perhaps, one of the men who roughed him up?

  The only logical conclusion can be that he is being set up to take a fall. It must be why Marcello has been so generous in loaning him the room; it must be why Marcello took him fishing on that particular night, to ensure his alibi would be, at best, questionable; and it explains when the Beretta was stolen and why Marcello was so ready and willing to take the Mara out of the water.

  Ric sits on the edge of his bed and weighs his options. They are simple: front up to Commissario Talaia about the gun and the passports, sit around and wait for the situation to spiral even further out of control, or get up and go out and force others to show their hand. The first risks his annihilation at the hands of the Sicilian justice system: he recalls what Valeria said, “You are likely to die of old age before a judge will sentence you to death.” The second is tantamount to surrender and he knows that would leave too unpalatable an after-taste. But the third will at least afford him some comfort in the knowledge that he is trying to fight his way out of a cul-de-sac someone else appears hell-bent on backing him into.